1. Technical Field
The present disclosure is generally related to speech recognition, and more particularly to improving recognition of speech with different accents.
2. Background
Speech recognition systems are becoming increasingly popular. Systems such as interactive voice response telephone systems provide users with experiences intended to create the sensation of speaking to a machine. At the same time, users can become quite frustrated when such a system doesn't work, either by misunderstanding the user or by asking the user to repeat themselves.
A challenge has been speakers with accents. While humans have the mental capacity to understand many different accents, this still poses a challenge for computer-based speech recognition systems. One approach has been to create a table for the computer system to be able to identify which accent a user is speaking with. Unfortunately, this table-based approach is difficult to implement for more than a small number of accents because of issues such as the table size and the processing capability required to consider all of the various possible accents in the system.